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Assignment #6

Many people in this world think heterosexuality, being attracted at male and female each other, is the natural thing as a human being. However, in her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Adrienne Rich contends that heterosexuality is not natural thing in mankind, but an institution forced by societies and culture that oppress women into subordinate situation. For example, throughout many generations, women were depend on men economically and therefore they had less right in the family. The only way for women to get the power was a marriage. However, as female got depend on male, societies started to represent the male power over female.

Male had stronger power so that they denied women sexuality. In addition, male forced female to satisfy male sexuality by means of rape, which including marital rape. Therefore, society only gave an option of heterosexual marriage, and women had no chance to show their sexuality, and hid them to stay in the society. Women had to be in that format no matter what the marriage made them happy or not. On the other hand, nowadays, women have power and right to achieve those economic status so that they started to get out of that social institution of heterosexuality, and having relation of lesbian like homosexual marriage. Nevertheless, male still trying to oppress rebel of female. For example, most of the States in United States have laws that homosexual marriage is illegal. In addition, there are still oppression of male towards female to keep the male power over female. We could see it by the number of males working at professional jobs compare to number of females’.

Another point Rich argued in this essay is about the potential of feminist thought. It is true that most female in this world are heterosexual. However, Rich pointed out that Feminist didn’t concern or include the existence of lesbian in the writings like feminist scholarship. Rich see that lesbian is also part of the feminist. All these examples that Rich wrote on her essay proves that women have lack of choice which led to inhibition of women to show their true sexuality.